A SEEMINGLY interminable ride followed, they rattled over rough stones,
rolled with a clacking tire over asphalt. A smell unnamable, fulsome,
corrupt, hung in Anthony's nostrils; the driver objurgated his horse in
a desperate whisper; Tom's head fell from side to side on his breast.
The mists surged about Anthony, veiling, obscuring all but the sullen
purpose compressing his heart, throbbing in his brain.
There was a halt, a rocking pavement and unctuous tones. Then a hall, a
room, and the tinny racket of a piano, feminine voices that, at the same
time, were hoarsely sexless, empty, like harsh echoes flung from a rocky
void. A form in red silk took possession of Anthony's hand, sat by his
side; a hot breath, a whisper, flattened against his ear. At times he
could distinguish Tom's accents; he seemed to be arguing masterfully,
but a shrill, voluble stream kept pace with him, silenced him in the
end.
Anthony strove against great, inimical forces to maintain his sanity of
action, ensure his purpose: he sat with a grim, haggard face as rigid
as wood, as tense as metal. The cloudy darkness swept over him,
impenetrable, appalling; through it he seemed to drop for miles, for
years, for centuries; it lightened, and he found himself clutching the
sides of his chair, shuddering over the space which, he had felt, gaped
beneath him.
In moments of respite he saw, gliding through the heated glare,
gaily-clad forms; they danced; yet for all the dancing, for all the
colors, they were more sinister than merry, they were incomparably more
grievous than gay. A tray of beer glasses was held before him, but he
waved it aside. “Champagne,” he muttered. The husky voices commended
him; a bare arm crept around his neck, soft, stifling; the red silk form
was like a blot of blood on the gloom; it spread over his arm like a
tide of blood welling from his torn heart.
He thought at intervals, when the piano was silent, that he could
distinguish the sound of low, continuous sobbing; and the futility of
grief afforded a contemptuous amusement. “It's fierce,” a shrill voice
pronounced. “They ought to have took her somewhere else; this is a
decent place.” A second hotly silenced this declaration. In the
jumble of talk which followed he heard the title “captain” pronounced
authoritatively, conclusively imposing an abrupt lull. Men entered. With
an effort which taxed his every resource of concentration he saw that
there were two; he distinguished two tones--one deliberate, coldly
arrogant, the other explosive, iterating noisy assertions. Peering
through the film before his eyes, Anthony saw that the first,
insignificant in stature, exactly and fashionably dressed, had a
countenance flat and dark, like a Chinaman's; the other was a fleshy
young man in an electric blue suit, his neck swelling in a crimson fold
above his collar, who gesticulated with a fat, white hand.
Anthony felt the attention of the room centered upon himself, he heard
disconnected periods; “... to the eyes. Good fellow... threw friend
out--one of them lawyer jags, too dam' smart.” A voice flowed, thick
and gummy like molasses, from the redness at his side, “He's my fellow;
ain't you, Raymond?”
A wave of deathly sickness swept up from the shuddering void and
enveloped him. He summoned his dissipated faculties, formed his cold
lips in readiness to pronounce fateful words, when he was diverted
by the sharp impact of a shutting door, he heard with preternatural
clearness a bolt slip in its channel. The young man in the blue suit had
disappeared. Again the sobbing, low and distinct, rose and fell upon his
hearing.
There was a general stir in the room; the form beside him rose; and he
was lunging to his feet when, in the act of moving, he became immovable;
he stood bent, with his hands extended, listening; he turned his head
slowly, he turned his dull, straining gaze from side to side. Then he
straightened up as though he had been opened by a spring.
“Who--who called?” he demanded. “Who called me--Anthony?”
In the short, startled silence which followed the room grew suddenly
clear before him, the mist dissolved before a garish flood of gaslight
that fell upon a grotesque circle of women in shapeless, bright apparel;
he saw haggard, youthful countenances on which streaks of paint burned
like flames; he saw eyes shining and dead like glass marbles; mouths
drawn and twisted as though by torture. He saw the fragile, fashionably
dressed youth with the flat face. No one of them could have called him
in the clear tone that had swept like a silver stream through the miasma
of his consciousness.
Again he heard it. “Anthony!” Its echo ran from his brain in thrills of
wonder, of response, to the tips of his fingers. “Anthony!” Oh, God!
he knew now, beyond all question, all doubt, that it was the voice
of Eliza. But Eliza was dead. It was an inexplicable, a cunning and
merciless jest, at the expense of his love, his longing.... “Anthony!”
it came from above, from within.
A double, sliding door filled the middle of the wall, and, starting
forward, he fumbled with its small, brass handles. A sudden, subdued
commotion of curses, commands, arose behind him; hands dragged at
his shoulders; an arm as thin and hard as steel wire closed about his
throat. He broke its strangling hold, brushed the others aside. The door
was bolted. Yes, it came from beyond; and from within came the sobbing
that had hovered continuously at the back of his perception.
He shook the door viciously; then, disregarding the hands tearing at him
from the rear, burst it open with his shoulder. He staggered in, looking
wildly about.... It had, after all, been only a freak of his disordered
mind, an hallucination of his pain. The room was empty but for the young
man in electric blue, now with his coat over the back of a chair, and
a girl with a torn waist, where her thin, white shoulder showed dark,
regular prints, and a tangle of hair across her immature face.
The man in shirt sleeves rose from the couch, on which he had been
sitting, with a stream of sudden, surprised oaths. The girl who stood
gazing with distended eyes at Anthony turned and flashed through the
broken door. “Stop her!” was urgently cried; “the hall door--” Anthony
heard a chair fall in the room beyond, shrill cries that sank, muffled
in a further space.
The two men faced him in the silent room: the larger, with an empurpled
visage, bloodshot eyes, shook with enraged concern; the other was as
motionless as a piece of furniture, in his wooden countenance his
gaze glittered like a snake's, glittered as icily as the diamond that
sparkled in his crimson tie folded exactly beneath an immaculate collar.
Only, at intervals, his fingers twitched like jointed and animated
straws.
An excited voice cried from the distance: “She's gone! Alice's face
is tore open... out the door like a devil, and up the street in her
petticoat.”
The man with the flushed face wilted. “This is as bad as hell,” he
whimpered. “It will come out, sure. You--” he particularized Anthony
with a corroding epithet. “The captain is in it deep... this will do for
him, we'll all go up--”
“Why?” the other demanded. He indicated Anthony with his left hand,
while the other stole into his pocket. “He brought her here... you heard
the girl and broke into the room; there was a fight--a fight.” He drew
nearer to Anthony by a step.